Steve: fx question, Soldano GTO

Hey Steve, my name's Jeff, you may recall we met at the Bassquake thing at NAMM in January, I was hanging out with Steve "Dude" and Pete and their wives.... Anyway, I had a thread over on the effects page that didn't get a lot of response, so I thought I'd throw it up over here.

Do you (anyone?) have any experience with the Soldano GTO Supercharger stomp box? Built like a tank, prohibitively expensive, apparently very similar to a H&K tube-somethingorother.... I think it was designed to emulate the preamp section of some vintage "holy grail" type of guitar amp. With bass, it emphasized some of the higher harmonics such that any single note came out sounding like a power chord with a huge, warm, fuzzy distortion. So kinda like a bass and a guitar, all with rich distortion. Sounded great solo, but when using it with the group a lot of the effect got lost in the mix.

I've never been an fx kinda guy but this thing rocked. I've always thought of bass overdrive/distortion as adding some "edge," not making a bass sound like Yngwie. No way I could justify buying one, but was curious if there's anything that'll come close without costing huge $$$?

Being the international phenom that you are, you could probably get them to send you one, probably overnight, yeah? Sure! Okay, well if you see one you might have fun messing around with it, and it'd be a blast to hear you ripping up on one. Hope all is well with you, take care, Jeff

I've not tried the Soldano thang, and not writing for a mag anymore means I'm less likely to be able to blag one to try for a while... I'll have to wait 'til NAMM next year to give it a whirl. Soldano amps are pretty legendary in rock-guitar-land, so I've no doubt it will be a stellar pedal. My main FX processor - Lexicon MPX-G2 - does some pretty incredible distortion, which I used to augment by having an SWR Interstellar Overcrive in the FX loop, so I was distorting it twice. The tone was unbelieveable, but I just haven't got the rack space or the back-strength for stuff like that, so I just spent some time tweaking the settings in the G2 til I got the tone I was after. I'm pretty psyched with my distorted tone now...

FX junkies seem to fall into two camps - those who buy squillions of pedals and get great sounds in the studio, but have a nightmare playing live, and those who are looking for the holy grail of portability and flexibility... At the moment I'm in the latter camp, and find the G2 does just about everything I could want it to do... so much so that I've got another one on the way - partly as a back-up in case mine breaks, but also to see what I can do with two of these suckers...

But I will keep an eye out for the Soldano - you never know, this could be the box that gets me back into carrying around bags full of pedals... I'm already lusting after a Mooger Fooger, after hearing what the pedal steel player I work with does with is - it's a pretty incredible sound...